A Commentary by Tea Party Patriot
“What the hell is wrong with you Tea Party idiots? It’s not about winning, it’s about the game; the juice is in the game! The worst thing that could happen would be for us to beat the Democrats. That would be game over. That would be anarchy. You people need to get with the program. We supply the game, the people supply the money. They pay us for the privilege of playing the game. We push their buttons with the issues and they write the checks. Everybody’s happy; everybody wins and we don’t need a bunch of Tea Party crusaders “holding our feet to the fire” or any of the rest of that Tea Party BS.”
The above statement is an off the record quote from one of the party bosses in response to the suggestion that if they really wanted to beat the Democrats, they should be selling conservative rather than Republican. One of the frustrations of the TEA Party has long been the refusal of the Republican Party to accept (support) conservative candidates.
It just didn’t make sense that a political party would ignore the numbers if they really wanted to win. We’ve watched one election after another go down the tubes because the Republican Party continues to field milquetoast moderates instead of conservative candidates.
Here are the facts. Registered Republicans make up 18% of the voting demographic while registered Democrats number 34% of that same demographic. Conclusion; Republicans go into every election with at 16 point disadvantage. Why would they do that when they could be winning every election because 40% of voters are self described conservatives while only 22% of voters are self described liberals? That gives conservatives an 18% advantage in every election and the numbers are even higher here on the western slope.
So why do we have a Democrat governor and two Democrat Senators? To the Tea Party that seemed a fair question. And the answer appears to be self evident. It is more important to the Republican Party for their party to win than for conservatives to win. But like all logic, that conclusion is in the eye of the beholder. That was before we realized “the juice was in the game” not in the winning. And the juice is what it’s all about.
All that time we’d been playing the wrong game. We were totally vulnerable. We didn’t have a wall of surrogates and shill groups or bank accounts stuffed with special interest money. We just fell off the turnip truck and found ourselves in a high stakes, no holds barred poker game where everybody at the table only had one goal; to beat us. We were the interlopers in a game of partisan politics that really wasn’t a game of partisan politics.
We were looking at the pot in the middle of the table while the political parties were only interested in the ante; the sure thing, the game that they can’t lose. They were the house. They got paid regardless of who drug the pot, who won the election. The issues; gun control, abortion, environmental, etc, etc were just the come on. The issues are what get the players off the turnip truck and into the game and eventually the antes are what empty your pockets through the inevitability of gradualism.
The longer you stay in the game, the more you lose. And eventually you end up betting the farm just trying to break even. That’s the game and it’s the only game in town but the game has a problem; less and less people are playing. That’s why you perceive the issues to be more and more radical and life altering. If the house (political parties) is to stay in business, they have to attract new players.
There has to be a continuum of pockets to pick clean and every four years the turnip truck arrives right on schedule. The players unload and the suckers with their pockets turned inside out line the street with their thumbs out hoping to catch a ride back to the farm; if they still have a farm. And the game goes on. You bet your life the game goes on.
So if you pass a person wearing a yellow Tea Party hat with his pockets turned inside out (coming from a political party event), his thumb out on your way out of town, for God’s sake don’t stop and give him a lift. But you might consider throwing your spare change out the window in empathy with a person who lost everything they had trying to win back the farm we call our country in the rigged game of juice where the only change must come from the people.
And maybe a little further down that road you’ll find a yellow Tea Party hat alongside the road blowing in the wind that you can recover and keep as your own. Inside the sweatband you’ll see a label that reads; “Made in the USA, One size fits all”.